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Reported by: Gérard Talbot, Chris Lilley Section 15.5 (Small-caps: the 'font-variant' property) [http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#small-caps] uses the terms "letters" and "characters" but it should use the term "glyphs" instead. Conversation begins: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0350.html (Issue 3) Bug description: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0427.html
This issue possibly arises elsewhere in the spec too; review needed.
Gérard Talbot suggests replacing "letters" with "characters" in item 2 of the second list in Section 15.2 (Font matching algorithm) [http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#algorithm]. Conversation begins: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0350.html (Issue 3) Bug description: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0472.html (First part)
Peter Moulder thinks[1] that just replacing "letters"/"characters" with "glyphs" in 15.5 is not ideal either since (for example) that ignores the transformations specified in Unicode's SpecialCasing.txt file. He suggests that the main point that the spec should convey is just that it's acceptable to use scaled uppercase glyphs in place of true small-caps glyphs: it needn't say anything about how to choose the string of glyphs (as any mention of lowercase glyphs tends to imply). [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0531.html